Kayaking the Sailboat Channel

I cant believe it has been ten days since I last wrote on our blog/journal. Now I am three entries behind and so for that I apologize. The real reason I write this blog is so Renita and I are able to keep track of our retirement travels. So now its catch up time.

After Hurricane Harvey we talked with our friend Dave. He had told us that a friend of his had looked at the storage garage and that it had lost its garage door and been looted, (his fifth wheel had also been looted and he lost his fishing poles). Last spring Dave and John had offered to let us store our kayaks inside their bin, so we were surprised when Dave said that the storage door was only partially off and that the kayaks were still inside!

We waited till our friends arrived and were able to retrieve our yaks. A few days later we headed to the sailboat channel for our first kayak fishing. Arriving at the channel we were surprised at the extreme high tide. It was so high that the location where we usually parked the truck was flooded.

Still we were able to find a place on the sand where we could park and launch the yaks. Paddling to our first spot we anchored and baited up with live shrimp. As fast as we could throw out we had bites and caught fish after fish, mostly small reds, whiting, and sand trout.

All the fish were small, but we were greeted by a dolphin, probably feeding on the ever-present mullet and sand trout. Still we were having fun, when I set the hook on another trout. It fought harder than the others and it turned out to be the largest sand trout we have ever caught, fifteen inches!

Putting it on the stringer we were lulled into complacency by more small fish. Suddenly my reel screamed as a large fish, probably a black drum made a run. I picked up the rod to fight the fish when the line suddenly snapped. I had been lazy and even though we had caught a lot of fish, I had not checked the line and retied, a rookie mistake.

We did catch some whiting and I kept a larger one hoping to have enough for a meal. However no more large fish bit and so we ended up with leftovers for dinner, (we rarely eat cornbread anymore as it bad for our Keto diet). Still it had been a lot of fun, kayaking, catching fish after fish, and just plain relaxing while fishing the channel. Clear skies